Breakfast in Europe is different than breakfast in the US. In the US I typically eat pancakes or cereal or potatoes and eggs.
Since we’ve been in Europe, I haven’t eaten any of those things for breakfast. My breakfast almost every day has looked like this:
Here’s what Julia wrote about breakfast in the Philippines:
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When people talk about a typical Filipino breakfast, two things usually come to mind: the pandesal and the silog.
What is a pandesal? The pandesal (salt bread) is a small piece of bread, around the size of a dinner roll, heavily loaded with bread crumbs. It’s toasted, slightly salty and crispy on the outside, and soft and sweet on the inside.
Every bakery in the Philippines makes and sells pandesal. This type of bread is such a big part of our culture, that people would wake up early and line up for a bag of warm, freshly baked pandesal for breakfast. Even the Philippine government goes out of its way to protect the pandesal. Whenever the price of wheat or sugar would fluctuate, the government would be on it right away because nobody wants to lose their beloved morning pandesal.
And if you’re the type of person who sleeps in, tough luck. Bakeries would always run out by mid-morning. But if you’re willing to wait, you can try early in the afternoon when bakeries make another batch for snacks.
You can eat pandesal on its own or use it as sandwich bread and fill it up with whatever you like. My favorite is scrambled eggs. My husband likes liver spread or Spanish sardines. Dunking your pandesal in coffee is also common practice.
The small size of the pandesal makes it ideal for an afternoon snack (hence the afternoon batch). You know it’s afternoon pandesal when people dunk their bread in Coke instead of coffee.
I promise, it’s a thing here in the Philippines, but I don’t get it either.
If you want a heavy breakfast, another Filipino breakfast classic is the “silog”. It’s not just one dish. It’s more like a family of dishes. The “si” in silog stands for “sinangag” (fried rice in Filipino), and the “log” stands for “itlog” or egg in Filipino.
When a dish has a protein (usually fried), garlic fried rice, and an egg (usually sunny side up), that dish becomes a “silog”.
So when you have a fried hotdog, garlic fried rice and egg, you get “Hotsilog”. My favorite is the “Spamsilog”.
If you want a classic silog, go for Tapsilog. Tap is short for “tapa” or cured beef “jerky”. Unlike American jerky though, tapa is not preserved. It needs to be kept in the freezer and thawed before cooking.
If you want to sell breakfast in the Philippines, you’ve got to have the silog and pandesal. Even McDonald’s has them here.
When we’re in McDonald’s, my husband usually orders the longgasilog. Longganisa (Philippine sausage that comes in many variations) in McDonald’s is a skinless sweet sausage. And yes, our McDonald’s makes fried rice.
My favorite is the one pictured below. It’s a pandesal with a cheese omelet. We do have McMuffins but I prefer their pandesal meals because they’re lighter and less greasy.
Like the rest of the world, the McDonald’s here refuses to serve these breakfast items after 11 am.
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Nothing to add…So good.
John